Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  Despite the political undertones, the medical influences, the emotional implications and, for that matter, the unavoidable presence and popularity of Géricault’s subject matter in French culture at the time, there is no doubt that he revelled in the aesthetic of suffering more than most. Not for nothing did he become a hero of the Romantic movement. He drew the condemned, the mad, the sick, the destitute and the dead. He saw beauty where others turned away, or gawked. One of his friends, Théodore Lebrun, remembered meeting Géricault around the time he was working on the Medusa. Lebrun was suffering from jaundice at the time, a condition that so disfigured him, he found terrified people closing their doors to him on the street – yet Géricault told him, ‘How beautiful you are!’ and asked him to pose for a portrait. Lebrun realized that he ‘did seem beautiful to this painter who was searching everywhere for the colour of the dying’.

  Géricault found disfigurement more compelling, more real and significant, than classical beauty, although we can now see that his work takes its place within the classical tradition, not least in the impressively muscular figures that populated his Raft of Medusa, athletic heroes who stood in for a wretched group of emaciated half-dead madmen. Few people at the time commented on the traditional character of his work: Géricault was heralded as a revolutionary, both by those who loved his art and by those who hated it. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, self-professed guardian of the academy, found the Medusa shocking. ‘I don’t want any part of the Medusa and the other pictures of the dissecting room which show man as a cadaver, which show only the Ugly, the Hideous. No! I don’t want them! Art must be nothing but Beauty and teach us nothing but Beauty.’ By contrast, Eugène Delacroix, Géricault’s friend and spiritual heir, saw several of his ‘anatomical’ studies and remembered them all his life; they seemed to him ‘truly sublime’ and ‘the best argument for Beauty as it ought to be understood’.

  It is easy to exaggerate the story of Géricault’s severed heads. Earlier, I described his studio in 1819 as a morgue, as countless other writers have before me, but the surviving paintings and drawings depict only one severed head (which he painted several times), two amputated arms and a leg. There may have been more. A catalogue of the sale of his studio in 1824 lists one lot of ten studies of ‘diverses parties du corps humain’, which may refer to other studies of dismembered cadavers that have been lost. There are several extant drawings of flayed cadavers that look as if they have been made in the dissecting room. His first, and most often quoted, biographer, Charles Clement, referred to ‘numerous corpses’ in his studio, a severed head that he kept for fifteen days, and friends who were too overcome to visit. And yet, death was part of the life of Paris at the time. It was a dirty and diseased city, populated by many who had been mutilated by war or poverty. It was a city where brutal decapitations were performed in public on the scaffold every week to jeering crowds, and where dead bodies were easy to find.

  Neither was Géricault alone in seeking a more intimate relationship with the dead, for two younger artists, Alexandre Colin and Charles-Emile Champmartin, worked alongside him during his candlelit sessions with severed limbs. Champmartin’s own painting of a severed head from this time, After Death, was, until recently, attributed to Géricault. Another member of their circle of painters, Auguste Raffet, was said to have obtained the head of a young soldier from a military hospital and spent several days ‘painting it in every aspect … alternatively stuck on a pike or laid out on a charger’. These men sought out dead bodies for their art and, in the vicinity of the guillotine, which never ceased its work, perhaps a severed head seemed less, if only a little less, abhorrent than it does today.

  Historians tend to want to explain Géricault’s paintings, as I have done, as if their creator needs rehabilitating, as though we need reassurance that Géricault himself was not a degenerate for wanting to work with dead body parts, but, on the contrary, a brave and unusual master of his art. Dead bodies are generally hidden from public view today, but artists are still more likely than most of us to mingle with the dead. Contemporary artists like Quinn, in contrast to Géricault, who kept his anatomical studies private, have become famous for their ‘shock art’.

  In 1981, Damien Hirst was photographed posing next to a severed head in a morgue in Leeds. He was sixteen years old. The head – that of a bald man whose identity remains unknown – is sitting on a metal table, and Hirst leans right down for the photograph, cheek to cheek, so he is almost touching the dead man’s face. Hirst is grinning for the camera, showing off, but he later remembered that his pleasure was laced with fear. It was the thrill of teenage rebellion:

  It’s me and a dead head. Severed head. In the morgue. Human. I’m sixteen … If you look at my face, I’m actually going: ‘Quick. Quick. Take the photo.’ It’s worry. I wanted to show my friends, but I couldn’t take all my friends there, to the morgue in Leeds. I’m absolutely terrified. I’m grinning, but I’m expecting the eyes to open and for it to go: ‘Grrrrraaaaagh!’

  Even as a boy, Hirst wielded his power to shock with consummate skill. At the time, he wanted to impress his friends; ten years later, when he released the photograph as a limited edition print on aluminium, titled With Dead Head, he was making a name for himself on the contemporary art scene with his first solo exhibitions. He knew, instinctively, how to make an impact.

  In this photograph, Hirst’s callous joke and his brazen attitude leave us questioning our own assumptions. Like Géricault, Hirst plays with our revulsion and draws us in despite ourselves. With Dead Head exemplifies many of the themes that have absorbed Hirst throughout his career: the blurred boundaries between life and death; the processes of dissection, decay and preservation; the limits of disgust and fear; the social effects of medical and scientific intervention, as well as the power of self-indulgence, humour and controversy to move us.

  With Dead Head by Damien Hirst, 1991.

  The archaeologist Sarah Tarlow has described the image as an ‘abuse of power’ which ‘breaches all professional standards of those who regularly deal with the bodies of the dead’. Hirst’s subject is clearly recognizable, although apparently anonymous, and he never gave his consent to Hirst’s ‘exploitative and insensitive’ work.

  Hirst had gone to the morgue that day to draw the human anatomy, and he was drawing to learn about life and death.

  When I was really young, I wanted to know about death and I went to the morgue and I got these bodies and I felt sick and I thought I was going to die and it was all awful. And I went back and I went back and I drew them … It’s like, you know, I was holding them. And they were just dead bodies. Death was moved a bit further away … The idea about death, you know, when you’re actually confronted with that kind of thing – all these kinds of images – it just gets relocated somewhere else.

  Hirst was acclimatizing to the dead. He did it with a teenage bravado that continues to colour his work: ‘The people aren’t there. There’s just these objects, which look fuck all like real people. And everyone’s putting their hands in each other’s pockets and messing about, going wheeeeeeyy! with the head … it just isn’t there. It just removes it further.’ Had Hirst objectified the dead so successfully that he no longer thought of them as people at all? Or were the disrespectful jokes an attempt to hide his own emotional fragility? He said that he was terrified the severed head would come back to life, as though confirming that it was not just an object or a plaything after all.

  As a work of art, With Dead Head can be interpreted as an image of conquest, but as a photograph it also documents a moment of childish swagger in what was, ostensibly, an honourable pursuit for a sixteen-year-old boy. Hirst was at the morgue to learn how to draw. If he went back there again and again to draw the dead, there must have been quieter moments of contemplation during his work too. Drawing dead bodies necessitates a complicated emotional journey.

  Laura Ferguson, who is artist in residence at the New York University School of Medicine and runs drawing classes fo
r medical students and staff there, says of her own work, ‘There has to be a lot going on – it’s such a profound experience. But when you’re drawing, you’re expressing yourself, whether you like it or not. Something’s coming out of you – especially if you’re drawing from a cadaver or a part of one. You’re bound to be, on some level, dealing with feelings.’ Other artists have spoken about drawing dead bodies not just as a way of seeing, but as a way of knowing. Drawing is a way of being with the dead. It requires an intensity of gaze and a concentration of the artist’s entire body over long periods of time. Damien Hirst’s photograph was produced in a matter of seconds, but presumably his drawings took longer and focused his mind in a different way. ‘You spend so much time communing with the object or the thing that you’re drawing,’ Ferguson says, ‘that you come to know it in a way that’s much deeper than dissecting it or just looking at it in a book.’

  Joyce Cutler-Shaw, who is artist in residence at the School of Medicine, University of California San Diego, describes drawing the dead as ‘an empathetic embrace of the subject with the eye that is translated simultaneously through the hand’. It is a meditative process. And, she points out, the technical challenges that obsessed Géricault continue to preoccupy artists who draw dead bodies – for instance, how to differentiate death from sleep. Cutler-Shaw has talked of a difference in the weight and buoyancy of the body after death, but also that death, like life, is a process that changes through time as the body stiffens and then starts to decompose, or else is embalmed for further medical study. These are the kind of technical tasks that preoccupy an artist in the dissecting room.

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  Hirst’s With Dead Head presents the horror of a portrait that is real – dead – flesh and blood, and in doing so, Hirst flouts one of the most universal rules of the morgue and the dissecting room by laying bare the head of a cadaver. In medical laboratories, the cadaver’s head is usually wrapped under several layers of gauze while, in contrast, the body becomes the focus of intense contemplation and exploration – as though this particular portrait has been inverted. Students working in dissecting rooms often assume that the wrappings are designed to protect their sensibilities, as well as the cadaver’s dignity, because it is easier to cut into a human body when you have never seen its face. But there are important practical reasons for covering the human head. Students spend many months dissecting a single cadaver, and the delicate flesh of the head and neck can dry out very quickly and is easily damaged. Wrappings protect the head, but, whether intentional or not, they also conceal the cadaver’s identity and help to turn a dead person into a suitably scientific specimen. If the head is precious, then this only emphasizes the need for discretion in such a dispassionate environment.

  Art has always existed in the anatomy room. Today medical artists work alongside photographers, radiographers and computer scientists to illustrate everything from surgical procedures to pathological specimens. In earlier centuries, drawing was integral to the anatomical endeavour, because it was the only way to record and communicate the complicated structures that anatomists discovered. The distinctions between the science of drawing and the art of anatomy have always been difficult to define. Famously, Leonardo da Vinci meticulously removed the flesh, ‘in very minute particles’, from several cadavers to familiarize himself with the human form. In describing his endeavours, da Vinci acknowledged that other artists might be deterred from such an occupation by their disgust, or by their fear ‘of living during the night in the company of quartered and flayed corpses, horrible to see’, or else by a lack of technical skill or patience. Drawing dead bodies anatomically is a demanding job, and da Vinci’s comments are as pertinent today as they were in the sixteenth century: once an artist has steadied his emotions, he must summon his talents and focus his mind.

  Medical artists work to a specific brief, selecting and clarifying medical information for a practical purpose, but over the last twenty years fine artists have become increasingly common on the staff of medical schools too. Lecturers recognize that art classes not only sharpen their students’ observation skills, they also ease the emotional burden of dissecting human bodies. Wonder and revulsion, ever in flux, are the twin responses to the study of ‘gross anatomy’; students learn to isolate and control them during their training, and medical schools have started to encourage students to express their feelings creatively, either through writing or drawing classes, as a way of helping them to manage their emotions.

  Certain parts of the body are particularly challenging for students because they resist objectification: a cadaver’s hands, genitals and head are repeatedly singled out because they are difficult to dissect. As one student wrote, ‘the head, the face, the neck are far too human’. Dissecting the human head makes you confront the nature of your work because, despite all the drapes and textbooks and protocols, you are still cutting up a recently living, smiling and thinking dead person. One study of creative projects at a medical school showed that students’ drawings often omitted the cadavers’ hands and faces. A student wrote in a creative writing class about sifting through the medical knowledge while purposefully ‘ignoring hands and faces’. Another, drawing a cancer patient who was still alive, wrote, ‘I painted her face disappearing into copies of her crumpled medical notes as if in order to see her as a scientific being, you would have to look through her.’ She portrayed the face as an absent presence, and covering it up was a tacit acknowledgment of its power.

  Other students decide to draw dissected heads and skulls in their art classes. One of Laura Fergusons’s students, Michael Malone, drew a bisected head, in a work he titled Abandon, that was later published in the New York University magazine Agora. When flayed and laid open on the bench, the dead human head can be an irresistable artistic subject, just as it is in life. Drawing also invites students to think of their patients as people with life histories. One admitted, ‘I was more inclined to think of the patients as people with individual lives,’ while another ‘realized you can depict both the patient’s and your own emotions within the picture’. Students may draw a severed head, or they may omit their subject’s head altogether, but either way, art gives the dead person a space to make their presence felt from in among the anatomical specimens.

  That said, the dissecting room is, first and foremost, a place of work, and practical considerations pertain. An art student may decide to draw a severed head simply because a severed head is available to draw that week. To a seasoned observer of the dead, a dissected head may not raise any particular comment. When I asked Joyce Cutler-Shaw about her drawings of dissected heads, she simply replied, ‘They were of dissected models in the UCSD anatomy teaching collection, dissected and preserved from real bodies. They were not connected to their bodies. I discovered them in the anatomy laboratory and was so intrigued I was compelled to draw them.’ Cutler-Shaw’s comments illustrate the pragmatism and the wonder of the dissecting room. To the uninitiated, the fact that a series of people’s heads, ‘not connected to their bodies’, can be ‘discovered’ in the laboratory is as intriguing as the heads themselves.

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  Drawings of dissected heads in the University of California, San Diego, anatomy teaching collection, by Joyce Cutler-Shaw, 1992.

  Some of the most extraordinary stories of an artist working with freshly severed heads come from Marie Grosholtz, later to be known as Madame Tussaud, more than two hundred years ago. Tussaud modelled victims of the guillotine as a young woman in her thirties in Paris during the Revolution. Madame Tussaud’s waxwork museum became famous for its display of revolutionary heads, and although Tussaud had modelled many of her subjects in life, a number of them were brought to her after their death. She later wrote that, after the storming of the Bastille, the severed heads of the prison governor, Bernard René de Launay, and the provost of the merchants of Paris, Jacques de Flesselles – who became known as the first victims of the Revolution – were taken down from the pikes and rushed to her salon, where she sat o
n the steps of the exhibition, with the bloody heads on her knees, taking impressions of their faces. She also claimed to have held the head of her friend Robespierre in her lap while she modelled it, fresh from the guillotine; and she remembered how she had been called to the scene of Marat’s murder by the gendarmerie, where, ‘under the influence of the most painful emotions’, she modelled his face while he lay, still warm and bleeding, in the bath. Later, she made death masks from the guillotined heads of King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette.

  Tussaud may have elaborated the details of these stories to stress the authenticity of her work, but she certainly became accustomed to handling severed heads. When the French artists Jacques-Louis David and Etienne-Jean Delécluze visited her waxwork salon in the early 1800s, they were shown a chest, in storage, filled with the waxen heads of famous revolutionaries, including that of Robespierre. The bandages holding Robespierre’s shattered jaw were in place, and David is said to have looked at the hoard for some time before declaring, ‘They are good likenesses, they are well done.’